


And Never Lose Affection

by CherryIce



Category: Dead Like Me
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Yuletide 2005
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-25
Updated: 2005-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-22 18:43:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/241302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherryIce/pseuds/CherryIce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life's a game of give and take. [Rube]</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Never Lose Affection

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rrain](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=rrain).



_At the Devil's Ball_ was the number one song when Rube died. Berlin Irving. Not that Rube knew it at the time, or for eighty or so years after. It's not as if the farm was the cultural centre of the county, or the state, or the country. Rube'd probably never heard it in his life, never hear Berlin sing _I had a dream last night/That filled me full of fright/I dreamt that I was with the Devil below.  
_  
He wonders now if it might have made a difference. A warning, or an admonition, or...

It has been many years since Rube was a religious man, but the silliest thoughts are the hardest to shake.

"Rube!"

"Gather much wool?" Kiffany asks, standing beside him with her pad raised and pen in hand. She's already got everyone else's orders scribbled down in neat blue ink.

"Nothing for me today, thanks," Rube tells her.

"Okay, hon," she says. Smiles at the table. "I'll be right back."

"Rube. You okay?" Roxy asks. She's sitting opposite him on the outside of the booth, hat on and legs in the aisle. She's got concern in her eyes, but she's already halfway gone.

"Fine," he says, but George and Daisy are looking at him with frowns. Mason is passed out one booth over. "The human brain is a remarkable thing, you know. More than a hundred trillion connections, each capable of performing more than two hundred calculations a second."

"And it's just so much tapioca pudding when it hits the ground," Daisy says.

"I never liked tapioca much," George says. "Reminded me of eyeballs. Eyeballs and, well, brains."

"I could do with some tapioca pudding right now," Mason says, hauling himself upwards in his booth, leaning over the top towards them. His hair sticks up at odd angles, and his face bears the imprint of his corduroy jacket.

"Yeesh," Roxy says and pushes him away. "You smell like something dead."

"I think I might have been, for a little bit there."

"Mason," George says. "You've been dead for thirty years."

"I think I was dead-dead, though. Just for fifteen minutes or so."

Rube sighs, and fights the impulse to put his head down on the table. "Right," he says, and hands out post-its instead.

"Half an hour at Thatcher and Bromine," Daisy says. "Isn't there a new building going up there?"

"High rise condominiums," Roxy says. "You would not believe the protesters."

"Protesters?" George asks.

"Think the money should be going to affordable housing projects."

Mason snorts. "Silly them."

"Prime site for a long fall, though," Daisy says.

"Tell you what. I'll go with, and then we'll grab some tapioca."

"Excellent!" Daisy beams. "I haven't had it in years, and it's just so fun to say. Tapioca. Tapioca."

Rube closes his book with a snap, taps another packet of sugar into his coffee. "A hundred trillion connections, two hundred calculations per second, and this is what I'm stuck with."

*

The first time Rube saw Roxy, she was on stage. Cats. Penny was sitting on his left, mouthing every word to every song, Mason was slouched two seats over, head on Betty's shoulder, and Gordon was sitting on his right, hating Weber but trying to love it for Roxy's sake. Rube, who knew nothing of theatre or dance, knew two things: She was good, very good; and she would be dead by two in the morning.

"Such a shame," Penny said at breakfast, when she saw the note.

Penny was a chef, before; Gordon was an artist. Roxy onstage dancing, smiling, face striped with paint and sweat, and Gordon's eyes were sharp upon her.

"Like everyone else," Rube said, "I am going to die. But the words -- the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered."

"Straczynski," Gordon said, cigarette loose between his fingers and shadows in his eyes.

"You going to be able to do this?" Rube asked, voice low.

The smile that Gordon turns to him is a shadow of the smile he turned on Rube forty years ago, thirty, ten. "She can't die alone," Gordon said. "I can give her that, at least."

*

The brain is an amazing thing. When Rube stops to think about it, really think about it, it is almost overwhelming. A hundred trillion connections, and when he died all he knew was that a blow to the head would kill you. Maybe not as surely as an infected bullet wound to the lower abdomen would kill you, but it was a danger nonetheless.

A hundred trillion connections, two hundred computations per second, all constructing personality and storing memory. Give or take. Mason has a few less than most, chemical imbalances and ghosts in the machine.

It's funny, the things you lose. Pet's names, phone numbers, last thoughts, birthdays, the name of that little Chinese restaurant that makes amazing hot and sour soup. Rube thinks he's never heard _At The Devil's Ball_ , but he forgot his own birthday a few decades back.

*

Penny visits the Waffle Haus sometimes. Late nights, early mornings, she comes and drinks iced tea without the ice and nibbles on waffles. Rube only found out because Kiffany asked him if they'd had a fight.

"You transferred," he tells her the first time he comes in at two AM and finds her sitting in their booth, shoes off and feet pulled up on the bench. "You weren't exiled."

"I know," she says. Picks at her waffle, plain with whipped cream on top. "It's easier this way, though. I've always thought it was better to make a clean break."

Penny, Penny's been at this for almost a century now, and he can't say as he blames her for asking for a transfer.

(Just for a year or two, she said. I just need --

A moment of peace? He asked.

Something like that, yeah.)

So many faces. Penny's never been able to pull back, to distance herself, and part of Rube's ability to do so came from watching her fade. He can't image what it would have been like, waking up in the freezing water with bodies all around her and no one to explain things to her, can't imagine how many times she must have drowned between the Titanic and the rescue boats.

"I wonder, sometimes," Penny says, "if there's some sort of balance. If what we did before is the reckoning for our souls now. If we have to save one soul for each of our sins."

"I do not believe that," Rube says. "In fact, I refuse to believe it. And not just because it has been a very long time since I believed in God."

"Really?" Penny asks, quirks and eyebrow. "Any why is that?"

"It's quite simple," Rube says. "You, my dear friend, would be long gone to the next adventure."

She laughs, high and bright, and he didn't realize just how much he'd missed her until that moment. Didn't realize in part because her laughs had been getting less and less frequent, replaced with broad smiles that didn't quite reach her eyes.

"Hey," Rube says, and catches her hand. "Any time you want back in, you let me know."

Natural causes may be a nice assignment for a reaper, but it's exceedingly rare that anyone ever meets their quota there.

"Just a moment more," she tells him and closes her eyes.

Just a moment more.

*

So, what Rube has figured out in his long and illustrious (un)life is this: It's all about give and take. What is given may not be given freely, and what is taken may not be what's offered, may seem cruel or capricious, but there is an exchange.

Betty for Jonas, Mason for Ingrid, George for Robert, Roxy for Gordon, beautiful Gordon. He wonders who it was that Daisy replaced, and if they're the first group she's let close enough to see the parts of her that are torn and rough. It took Rube more time than he cares to admit to stop blaming her for taking Betty's place, more time than he cares to admit for him realize that Daisy was enough of an actress to pull the wool over his eyes.

Betty stayed as long as she did out of love for them, but she was always halfway to leaving, halfway across the next divide.

Rube tells them: Don't get involved. Hold your distance.

Do as I say, not as I do.

*

"What do you think you'll see?" George asks. "At the end, I mean."

"I don't know, Georgie," Mason says. "Lots and lots of beautiful women, I suppose. Naked. Oooh, and covered in chocolate."

"If they're covered in chocolate, they're not really naked," Daisy says, buffing her nails.

"No, seriously, guys," George says.

"Music," Roxy says, hands around her coffee cup as if to warm herself. "Music, building, until it swallows me whole."

"Light," Daisy says, after a moment. "Bright lights, and applause."

"And love," Mason says. Tells her.

"What about you, Mason?" George asks. Rube watches with a smile on his lips.

"Something other than this," Mason says. "Something bigger and better than this, where there are no post-it notes lurking around corners and there is no need for people like me."

"I don't know what I'll see," George says. "I honestly have no idea."

"That's because you're young, Peanut," Rube tells her. "And if you never figure it out, hey, it'll be a surprise."

Do as I say, and not as I do, because he loves them all. These losses are all he can deal with and stay sane (he spent fifteen years losing Gordon, ten years losing Penny). If he put this amount of caring into every post-it, he'd be drained inside of a week.

"What about you, Rube?" George asks. "What do you think you'll see?"

"Oh, I don't think, Peanut," he says. "I know. But it is a knowledge meant only for me."

At the end, he will see his daughter. He will see Rosie, and Lucy; he will see Betty and Gordon, Jonas, Ingrid, Robert. He will see everyone he has ever loved and they will be smiling.

And if this unlife is a reckoning for his sins and he is here until the end of all things, then he will see Daisy and Mason and Roxy and George, and everyone else he has yet to love.


End file.
